


Sworn to Lucidity

by GloriaMundi



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Charity Auctions, Community: help_japan, Diary/Journal, Gen, Gift Fic, Mal Was Right, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-04
Updated: 2011-08-04
Packaged: 2017-10-22 05:13:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/234217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GloriaMundi/pseuds/GloriaMundi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"This is my dream journal. I must write the twists of every dream: I must write the details of every day. Now, more than ever before, it's vital I remind myself, minute to minute, of the fine lines between dream, memory and the waking world."</p><p>Mal is awake. Dom sleeps on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sworn to Lucidity

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hesselives](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=hesselives).



This is my dream journal. I must write the twists of every dream: I must write the details of every day. Now, more than ever before, it's vital I remind myself, minute to minute, of the fine lines between dream, memory and the waking world.

I am sitting by the window. My husband Dominick sleeps beside me.

My world -- this world -- is real. He did not follow me far enough. We were supposed to be together, but he did not trust me. He betrayed me. And now that I've woken from our -- his -- dream, I can never trust him again.

*

There's thunder in the distance... Is it thunder? Or is it some old song, slow as glaciers, that means it's time to wake?

The turbulent clouds rumble, like heavy footsteps in an attic. The rain comes down like javelins. Around me, the buildings blur: Impressionist then abstract. The air is heavy with humidity.

"This is my world. This world is real," I tell my reflection. Mine: the one grey hair, the fine lines fanned at the corners of my eyes. "I am awake."

The Mal in the mirror winks at me. Outside the window, lightning washes the world white.

*

Dom lied to me. I tried to make him see, in the hotel, that he was still dreaming -- _merde_! I should have forced him to believe it, as he forced me to believe that my world (our world) was not real.

Even now I question what I see around me: the tiger-stripes of afternoon sunlight across his face, Phil's laughter in the garden, the taste of my own blood where I've bitten my lip. The toppling top that's rolling across the table with a sound like thunder, like an approaching train, like a world crashing down into ruin.

*

Yesterday I sat in the garden, in the sunshine, watching Philippa and James as they played. This morning, my skin is scorched and tender to the touch, and I believe what I already knew: that this is not a dream.

Neither sun nor moon shine in dreams. Oh, there was sunlight slanting over the empty plazas, moonlight silvering the slow waves. But whenever I looked up, the sky was blank, and the light came from everywhere and nowhere. I learnt never to look up.

Now I sit here rubbing aloe into my skin, and smile because I am awake.

*

My father's brought me another PASIV. "You need to get back on the horse," he told me. "Build yourself a dream. Remind your mind of what it's capable of creating."

I meant to dream of a garden, a place of peace. Instead I found myself on the Pont Neuf, with Dominick -- with my _projection_ of Dominick.

"You stayed behind," I accused him. "You let me fall alone."

"We were supposed to be together!" cried Dom.

"You're still dreaming," I said. "You're not real. You're trapped in dreams and you won't wake up."

"No," said Dom, frowning. "It's you who's trapped."

*

When I wake -- I am gasping -- Dom, again, does not. I sit up, dizzy with blood rushing to my head, with the memory of my leap into the void. The room is very quiet, dustmotes whirling around me. Philippa and James are with their grandmother: I don't like them to see me and their father sleeping so deeply. Philippa thinks I am Sleeping Beauty when I dream. I haven't the heart to let her discover that sometimes, a kiss is not enough.

Sometimes, Dom, a kiss -- a kick -- a kill is not enough.

I kiss him: he sleeps on.

*

"Papa, he keeps remembering my ... when I kicked myself out of the dream."

"Of course he does, Mallorie," says my father kindly. "It must have been devastating for him, to watch you --"

"No, Papa. I mean he ... it's as if he needs to see it from every angle. From impossible angles. From across the street. From down on the pavement! Every time I leap into the void, he's there."

My father waits.

"He never tries to catch me." I swallow, tasting copper, remembering the sound of my bones cracked open against concrete. "He lets me fall."

*

I told Dom that I'd dreamt we'd grow old together. I did not tell him of how I woke weeping from that dream. I knew he would eventually overwhelm me: that my hopes, fears, passions were not his.

Dom was, is, the greatest extractor in the world: but extraction is merely theft. Inception is... I am violated, my secret places no longer secret. My lover reached into my head and _changed_ me. He did not ask permission.

What stings most is that he was right.

No, what stings most is that he would not listen to his own advice.

*

"What willl you do when he wakes up?" asks my father. "He'll be disoriented. He'll need you to--"

" _I_ was disoriented, Papa! And _he_ did that to me! He took me down into the dream until I had forgotten that we were dreaming." Suddenly I am weeping, for the Dominick who is irrevocably lost and for myself, losing him. "He made me believe in him instead of in myself," I say thickly. "He was so sure of his truth that he reached into my mind and forced, forced--"

"But he was right, wasn't he?" says my father gently.

*

On that last level, waking in the dusty room that smelt of static and stale sleep, wandering the house and wondering how we'd come to be there ... then, I was right. Then, I knew that we had not yet woken from our decades of dreaming together. A man who will enter his lover's mind and align it with his own -- that man can, and will, do anything.

I am safe now, but I fear his waking. I fear the next seed he will plant in my mind. Perhaps it's better if I let him sleep, and dream, and scheme.

*

We built our cities and watched them crumble back to the raw material of creation. We grew old together, comfortably. Our love was as grand as myth, as magical as a fairytale.

It was all a lie.

If Dominick could make me question my reality, what else might he make me do? Did he make me believe that I loved him? Could he make me love him again, despite all he's done?

I believe that my love for him was real. I use the past tense. Love has crumbled into ruin now, and something dark has risen in its place.

*

"You need to fetch him out," my father says.

"No!" Why can't I make him see how afraid I am, now, of Dom?

"It's you that Dom loves. You have to --"

"Think of Orpheus," I say desperately. "Orpheus loses everything if he looks back. I didn't look back -- I couldn't look back, Papa! He should have been behind me!"

"He'll follow you, Mallorie. But if you won't go back for him --"

"A forger," I said, remembering a faded summer evening by the Serpentine. "We need a forger."

"More than just a forger. You need a whole team."

*

My father thinks me uncaring, cold. He cannot understand that I am frightened, weary, angry... I feel too much. I need to set my heart aside, approach the problem objectively.

One: I will _not_ go back into Dom's dream. My father says Dom will follow me. Therefore someone must wear my face: a forger.

Two: My husband no longer respects me. Therefore someone he respects must persuade him to wake: a colleague, an equal, a friend.

For the sake of my memories, for the sake of our children, I must try once more to lead Dom back to reality.

*

I can't forget that endless summer after graduation, when we took off for Europe to gorge our minds on antiquity and architecture.

I remember a July night, somewhere in the Dolomites. It was too cold to sleep: we huddled on a bench at the tiny railway station. Meteors arced through a clear moonless sky. By morning we were too tired to speak. We boarded the train we thought would take us to Rome, and found ourselves en route to Trieste.

"As long as we're together," said Dom, "it doesn't matter where."

I remember how happy we were, without a destination.

*

I have been thinking about Orpheus, who looked back and lost his love. I was braver. I did not look back: I trusted Dom to follow me as I had followed him up from Limbo.

We'd sunk through level after level, dived deeper than anyone had ever gone. I should have known we could not surface with a single kick. But Dom assured me it was so.

I trusted him. But now I wonder if, after all, I was afraid. If the reason that I did not look back was that I feared to find a monster behind me.

* * * 

It was a summer's day in London, at the cafe by the Serpentine, when Arthur first introduced me to Mr Eames. He didn't call himself Eames then, and he wasn't yet a forger: nobody was.

"This is Mr... Smith," said Arthur. "Mr Smith, this is Dr Mallorie Miles. Mal, this guy's gotten hold of a PASIV, and it sounds like he's come up with something new."

"Enchantée, mademoiselle," said Mr Smith, all empty charm. I remember noticing that he had beautiful eyes. They weren't windows to the soul, though: they were cameras, recording and focussing and noticing everything. _Everything_.

*

I need an exceptional forger: Eames, then. And _his_ name might convince Arthur, my husband's former colleague at the Institute, to join us. Dom trusts Arthur, respects his professionalism. As do I.

When I speak to Eames, he asks questions I can't answer (the dosage, the compound, the modifications) and then announces that he'll be bringing along a chemist of his acquaintance. "Probably best to have another architect to hand," he adds. "I've just completed a job with Nash, remember him?"

"Of course," I say. "Dom doesn't like him."

"Mmmm," says Eames. "But that's not really pertinent, is it?"

*

Walking in the rain in Paris, the smell of wet pavements, the river hissing and boiling. My shoes were ruined: later, I'd pumice red dye from my heels. Dom wrapped his jacket around me, kind as a prince in a fairytale. His shirt was soaked through, and I longed to warm him. I remember feeling suddenly desperate to hold onto him, skin to skin, each of us kept safe in the other's embrace.

But this is no fairytale. Dom is no Sleeping Beauty, no Snow White waiting in a glass coffin. Just my sleeping husband, oblivious to my kisses.

*

"In Dominick's heart -- in his dreams -- he has always been the hero, brave and kind. He has always looked after those he believes to be weaker than himself. He has always known best. But now I realise that at his core he's a coward."

"A coward?" says Arthur. "What the hell?"

"He's afraid of me," I say. "He's made me a monster, a nightmare locked away in that prison of memories. He's afraid of me because he killed me. He's afraid to wake up, to confront me in all my reality. He's a coward, Arthur. Sleeping is the easy option."

*

Outside, the rain falls steadily, like seconds ticking past. It means nothing: it is simply rain, falling from the cloudy sky, watering the plants and soaking the earth. There's a word for the smell of earth after rain: petrichor. There are no words for the weather in Limbo. When it rained, there, it meant that one of us was sad. When a hurricane howled in from the endless ocean, it drowned our voices raised in anger. When night fell with no stars, it was because I was so very tired, and longed to sleep, and dared not hope to dream.

*

"This is Yusuf," says Eames. "The best chemist I know."

"Pleased to meet you," says Yusuf. His eyes are wary. "So: Mr Cobb changed the formula?"

"I don't know what he did," I say. "But we stayed in the dream for a very long time. So long that we forgot we were dreaming."

"How did you wake?" Yusuf asks me.

"Dom realised we were not gods but lost children. He ... reminded me of that."

"And yet he has not woken," says Yusuf thoughtfully.

"He hasn't finished playing God," I say, and I don't attempt to conceal my bitterness.

*

"I won't go into his dreams again," I tell them: tell them in words, but also with my whole body, arms folded across my chest, chin up, defiant. "I cannot bear it."

"Why not? Because he put an idea in your head?" says Arthur, as though it's a commonplace crime.

"It's more than that," says my father gently. "Isn't it?"

I scowl at him. This weakness, this defeat, is not something that I want Arthur to know. But he needs to understand.

"Because he kills me," I confess, to the floor. "Because he wants to believe I am dead."

*

Overheard this morning:

Eames: "Think of it as the perfect solution to all those sordid custody battles, Arthur. No need to fight about who gets Philippa and James: they both get them, and they both believe they've got the genuine versions.

(I can never tell when, if, he is joking.)

Arthur: "That's not funny."

Eames: "No, it's not funny at all. Because all those children have lost a parent."

Arthur, heatedly: "Dom's projecting --"

Eames: "He's projecting kids whose mother is dead. And Cobb's projections tend to be pretty thorough. Those children are suffering, even if they're not real."

*

"What if we simply ... unplug him?" says my father.

"Too risky." Yusuf's shaking his head. "I've run some tests on the altered Somnacin, and the changes he's made to the PASIV itself. It could kill him. Or, if his mind is strong enough, he might simply remain in the dream."

"What about ..." Eames waves a hand at Dom's recumbent form.

"Persistent vegetative state," says Yusuf. "Seizures. Trauma." Then, to Arthur's sceptical frown, "how should I know? Nobody's ever done this before!"

"That was why he did it," I say numbly. "To be the first."

To be the _only_.

*

I go down into Eames' dream with him and watch over his shoulder as he slides from self to self. Here is my father, and the easy warmth of his smile makes something twist, cold and sick, in my stomach. Here's Dom, and I turn away because it is not him. Here's Arthur in caricature, all sharp bones and scowl, clean and sharp as a razor.

And here ... here is me, a second Mal, twinned again in the mirror. When I raise my fingers to my lips, there's a heartbeat where I don't expect to feel my own touch.

*

"You'll need to be there for him," says Arthur. "Once we've got through to him, once we've brought him back to reality. He loves you, Mal. It'll be okay."

"You don't understand," I say wearily. "It can never be the same again."

"Not at first," says Arthur. "But once he recognises that he's really awake, you can start to rebuild your life together."

I am... tired, I realise. Tired of building and rebuilding our life together. Decades, just the two of us. We were sufficient to one another. But that was when I believed he would never lie to me.

*

"How can I stay?" I demand of Arthur. "How can I let my children stay with a man who would... who would do such a thing to me?"

"Your children, Mal. Yours and Dom's." Arthur's mouth is a straight line. He won't make this easy for me.

My headache grips tighter. "I cannot stay. You can't ask that of me, Arthur, you can't --"

"I'm not asking you to do anything," says Arthur. "I'm just saying. They're his kids too."

"What father leaves his children for a dream?"

"You'd have to ask Miles," says Arthur. "No, Mal, don't -- don't cry."

*

"I wish I could be sure," I say miserably, "that what he did to me was an aberration, that he would not betray another's trust..."

"Might I suggest a small experiment?" says Eames. "There's a way of testing that hypothesis."

Everyone speaks at once. Arthur's "How?" is loudest.

Eames turns to Yusuf. "Could you cook up something, in the dream, that'd endanger us all?"

"I could modify Mr Cobb's own sedative," says Yusuf.

"Righto. You tell Cobb it's risky," says Eames. "If he passes on the warning, then voila, trust is established. If not..."

I do not like his smile.

*

Nash and Arthur (and Eames, with many faces) will go down into Dom's dream. There are so many layers. Dom's waking world (just there beneath his eyelids) is one. Beneath that is the dream he'll create for his imagined Saito. Beneath _that_ , a dream within a dream, where Dom's guilt and grief will manifest as ... as me.

"I won't do anything to harm him," Eames assures me. He sees through my skin to my heart, my secrets. I want to wrap myself in darkness so that he can't see more than he already has.

"Of course," I say.

*

I remember when Dom asked me to marry him, and I confessed I'd dreamt of the two of us growing old together. Perhaps I planted the idea of marriage, of a lifetime of loving one another, in his head: but I did so in the way that humans have planted ideas for tens of thousands of years. I _spoke_ to him. I wrapped my thoughts in words and sent them out into the space between us. I did not put my thoughts into his mind. I did not creep in like a thief in the night and change the locks.

* * *

"Arthur's in," says Nash. He sits up slowly, breathing deep: his eyes fix on mine. "Took out the projection: your ... Cobb never noticed a thing."

"Why would he? Cobb always told me that Arthur was loyal like a dog."

"He killed himself like it was ..." Nash shakes his head. "A guy who can shoot his own projection in cold blood without turning a hair? Don't you think that's weird?"

"Arthur's not one to let sentiment get in the way."

"Don't you want to know --"

"No." I don't. If you can't kill yourself, who _can_ you kill?

*

Arthur wakes angry. "You kneecapped me, asshole!" he snarls at Eames as soon as the forger's eyes blink open.

"You think it was easy, being--" Eames' gaze slides to me, and he pauses, tempering his words. "Playing Dom's nightmare?"

"I am a nightmare, now?" I say.

"Dom's made a monster with your face," says Eames. "It wasn't pleasant, forging that."

"Does he believe--"

"Dom knows you're not his anchor," says Eames, smirking. "He knows he can't trust his projection any more." To Arthur, he adds, "Sorry to shoot you, but I think it made the point rather neatly."

*

"He's found an architect," says Eames, pouring coffee for me. "More accurately, he's created one. She's his self-doubt and disgust, with a smidgeon of common sense. Name of Ariadne." He rolls it around his mouth. I hope it tastes bitter.

"Ariadne, that girl who solves mazes and saves the hero," I say. "Dom always liked the Greek myths."

"A shame he didn't keep old Orpheus in mind," says Eames, unexpectedly sharp. "You know, the importance of not looking back."

"Think of Orpheus," I'd told my father. I feel cold and strange. But Eames' words are, surely, sheer coincidence.

*

"Cobb's on the run, down in the dream," Nash tells me.

"What is he running from?" I ask, though I know the answer. "What crimes has he committed?"

"He's wanted for murder," says Nash, stretching until his shoulders creak. He doesn't look away from me. "The murder of his wife."

So they found my letters, the trap I set. Half of my plan worked. (The _wrong_ half. We were meant to be together.) The whole world -- that dream world -- knows my Dominick has murder in his heart. They can't know that he has slain me already, again and again.

*

"I don't think I'll go down into the dream with you," says my father.

"Not a problem," says Eames. "Professor Miles, I assume you've no issue with my ... forging you?"

My father shakes his head.

"Anything particular I should say?"

"Tell him to come back to reality," says my father. "Tell him not to drag anyone else down into his dream. Tell him ..." He looks at me. "He believes he killed my daughter. Why would he listen to me?"

"Because, in Cobb's dream, you believe he's innocent," says Arthur.

 _Not only in his dream,_ I do not say.

*

"Cobb's recreated himself as a freelance extractor." Eames, with his whiteboard, has a professorial air. "A criminal, forced to work outside the law in order to redeem himself. The mark -- I beg your pardon, the _employer_ \-- is a Japanese energy mogul, name of Saito. Finding anything, Arthur?"

Arthur's fingers rattle on the keyboard. "Nothing relevant," he says.

Saito. I know that name. Not a businessman but a crimelord, who'd heard of extraction and came to Dom to learn how to keep his secrets safe. Everything, then, was an experiment. Saito's experiment failed. His own projections drove him to his death.

*

I understand, now, that my husband has surrounded himself with projections of people who've meant something to him, puppets to play out the game. (But who is Ariadne? His guilt, says Eames, but guilt shouldn't wear a young woman's face.) He has, though he doesn't know it, the real Arthur -- not Dom's doggishly loyal projection. He has Mr Eames masquerading as my father, myself, whoever Dominick needs to see.

He has a monster, created in my image.

Dom has built himself a world of mirrors and shades. In all that world, only he and the men he respects are real.

*

"I'm out of the game as far as Cobb's concerned," says Nash. "Sucks that he took Saito's word over mine. Threw me to the wolves." He winces at some memory.

"Perhaps his projection of you...?" I suggest, delicately.

Nash shrugs. "Whatever. He's changed, Mal. The Cobb I knew wasn't a criminal, and he wasn't unreasonable. Cobb down there..." He shakes his head. "He won't listen to anyone. Not me, not Arthur."

"He listened to Saito."

"He _is_ Saito," says Nash. "Or Saito's him. Dangerous guy, either way. Didn't know Cobb had it in him."

"Nor did I," I lie.

*

I went into Dom's dream today.

I wanted to find him, to make him realise that he still dreamt. Instead, I found myself in our wrecked room at the Fairmont. Glass cracked beneath a foot. It was Dom's little creation, his Ariadne.

"I'm just trying to understand!" she cried, and I dared to hope that those words were Dom's.

But when my husband appeared at last, I forgot myself. I longed to embrace him, to rage at him, to kiss to kill to keep him with me. I cannot forgive him for the fear on her pale, unreal face.

*

"If Eames' theory is correct," says Arthur, "everything anyone says to Ariadne in the dream is actually filtering through to Cobb's subconscious, yeah?"

I nod.

"Okay. I've noticed he's kind of obsessive about that totem of his." He jerks his chin at the top I'm twirling between my fingers. "Maybe he needs reminding that it'll only tell him if he's in someone _else's_ dream."

"He believes his world is real," I say. "Of course the totem behaves as he expects. It stops spinning because he's sure he's awake."

"I'll give Ariadne the spiel," says Arthur. "Let's hope it gets through."

*

"So you're just going to give up? Let Dom sleep forever?" My father is angry.

"Some fairytale princess can wake him with a kiss," I say mockingly. "Me? I looked back and saw a liar following me. A man who'd violate his own wife's mind as easily as thieving a secret from a businessman's dreams."

"Mallorie--"

"What would you say if he'd beaten me, Papa? If he'd taken a mistress? Why do you take his side?"

"You're upset, Mallorie. You'll--"

"But I don't love him any more!"

My father falls silent. We stare at one another, recognising defeat.

*

"I watch him every evening when he dreams," says Yusuf. "I believe he... visits you. His projection of you. Perhaps if you followed him into the dream, you could..." He waggles his fingers.

I find myself in an elevator, rattling down into the depths of Dom's mind. I watch from my cage as he courts me. As he persuades me to lay my head down on the railroad track. As he chants our mantra: it doesn't matter, because we'll be together.

I wake weeping. Yusuf hands me a glass of water: I hurl it to shatter against the wall.

*

"Well," says Eames, sitting up. "It seems to have worked."

I look at where Dom lies on the camp-bed, his chest rising and falling, his eyelids flickering as he dreams. He's smiling.

"I meant the job in the dream," says Eames, looking away. "Unfortunately, your husband seems to have convinced himself that he's awake."

"So," says my father, coming in with a fresh jug of coffee, "he's pulled off inception, eh?"

"It isn't his first attempt," I say coldly. "He knew it could be done."

Arthur slides the needle from his vein. "What now?"

"Let him sleep," I say.

*

I am cooking pasta for the children when Yusuf finds me.

"Cobb failed our test," he says without preamble. "I'm sorry: I was wrong. He knew the sedative would send them all to Limbo if they died, but he didn't tell them. Not even Arthur."

"Dom always knows best," I say, and his expression shows me that mine is ugly. "Didn't I say so? He plays god, because he believes that only he is real."

"He has surrounded himself with projections," says Yusuf. "Perhaps he's forgotten that he's not alone."

"I was real," I remind him. "But not to Dom."

*

"He had the opportunity to tell them about the dangers," says Yusuf. "He said nothing. And, to be fair ..." he glares at Arthur. "To be fair, none of you asked."

"That wasn't exactly me," says Arthur, exasperated.

"Cobb must think you're rather dim," says Eames.

Arthur rounds on him. "Not helping, Eames."

"Merely an observation," says Eames, amused.

If this were simply another project, I too would be amused at how easily Mr Eames exposes all our weaknesses. But there is nothing simple about our situation.

"Mr Eames," I say sharply, "do you have anything of significance to add?"

*

"There's got to be a way to wake him," insists Arthur.

"Why?" I demand. "He's happy in his own world, with himself at its centre and his dead wife banished to the underworld."

Arthur frowns at my disdain. "The kids need --"

"Need what? A father who'd murder their mother? A man who would force his wife --"

"Mal, calm down. It wasn't --"

"It was _rape_!"

My voice echoes. The look in Arthur's eyes, I decide, is betrayal.

"What if he wakes up tomorrow?" he says at last.

"Let him wake. I don't care."

My world is real.

*

"The mods to the PASIV are very clever," says Yusuf. "Mr Cobb knew what he was doing. In theory, with regular top-ups of Somnacin -- and fluids, nutrients, and so on -- he could remain in the dream forever."

"Then let him," I say. "He's happy in his own world, where he can play god and vanquish every projection of his guilt, his shame, his treachery. Let him sleep."

"So you're running away," says Eames. It is an observation, not a judgement.

"I'm walking away," I correct him. "I am walking back out into the bright light of my own life."

*

I slip into his dream like a shadow, watching from the upstairs window as he plays with his projections. _Phil's taller than that now,_ I want to shout. _James lost a front tooth last week._

Dom doesn't look up.

I go downstairs. On the dining table, amid the crayons and the toy cars, the little metal top spins crazily. Somewhere a radio is playing: _non, je ne regrette rien_.

I regret... No. I mourn what we had, and lost. That's all.

The knives are sharp and bright. This time I am alone; I don't look back; I cut myself free.

*

"And it was all a dream." Sometimes Dom would read stories to the children, and if they ended with those words I would be sad. Just a dream? Not real?

Now I give thanks that I am not old nor frail, that we did not live a lifetime in an empty world, that I've woken to the laughter of my children with tears on my cheeks. There is magic and beauty in the waking world that no mind can encompass: that my mind cannot encompass.

I am thankful, now, that dreams are only dreams. That my world is real.

-end-

**Author's Note:**

> This has taken an incredibly long time to come together: apologies, dear **hesselives** , for the delay!
> 
> The request: "i would absolutely love a Dom/Mal fic, with more focus on Mal herself. (not enough Mal fics in fandom, i think!) haunting, heartbreaking, with maybe a little sweet somewhere within."
> 
> I'm not sure this is even in the same _universe_ as what you wanted, but I hope you enjoy reading it anyway.
> 
> Why, yes, these are all drabbles (my best solution to writing-blocks: write blocks!)
> 
> I suspect I've been influenced by some of the other Mal-was-right fics out there, notably [Amazing Grace](http://archiveofourown.org/works/195368) (AirgiodSLV) and [I am the hero of this story (don't need to be saved)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/113646) (electrumqueen).
> 
> The title is from Adrienne Rich's marvellous poem [I Dream I'm the Death of Orpheus](http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=432).
> 
> And last but definitely not least, I would like to strew roses at the feet of my beta **the_ragnarok_d** , without whose cheerleading, encouragement, pickiness and honesty this fic would (a) never have been completed (b) be much more meandering.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Orpheus, looking back (The Mal Knows Best Remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/383764) by [Aviss](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aviss/pseuds/Aviss)
  * [[podfic] Sworn to Lucidity](https://archiveofourown.org/works/863635) by [Chestnut_filly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chestnut_filly/pseuds/Chestnut_filly)




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